International radicalization forum kicks off Sunday in Quebec City

The word “jihad” isn’t usually associated with comedy. Yet that’s exactly what a play bearing that name promises — laughs. The play will be presented Sunday at the start of a major conference in Quebec City on radicalization.

“It’s full of jokes ... it opens the discussion, it opens free speech. After the play, people want to talk about it,” said Déborah Abisror, the play’s associate producer, from her office in France.

Abisror said that lightheartedness in the treatment of such a serious matter has worked miracles. She recalled a man whose arm was in a cast coming to see the actors after one performance. “He said: ‘I was at the Bataclan, I got four bullets, and it’s the first time that I can finally talk about it and I can move on. It’s the first time that I hear gunshots in a room and I feel finally better about it and I can sleep. And for one hour, I laughed. I thank you because I can finally move on.’ So it has an impact on people,” Abisror said.

The play — featuring Belgian writer/director and lead actor Ismaël Saïdi — explores the reasons motivating young men to go fight in Syria. For example, Abisror said, one of the main characters goes to Syria because his mother pressures him to find a proper Muslim girl to marry. “The mother in the play says ‘Non-Muslim girls are for fun, they’re not girls you marry’. We had a mother come see us after the play and say ‘I remember saying that to my kid and I realize that it’s wrong.’ ”

The play has become a sensation in Europe, where more than 65,000 people of all religious and political persuasions have seen it. The Belgian and French governments have incorporated it into their plans against radicalization.

The rights to Djihad (the French title) have been sold in Italy, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Japan, Abisror said. Its North American première will be Sunday in Quebec City, but performances will also be offered during Montreal’s Festival du monde arabe.

“In Europe right now it’s very difficult to talk about (radicalization),” Abisror said. “It’s always closed, like you can’t talk. It’s always ‘Oh, you’re stigmatizing, you’re racist, you’re anti-Islam,’ nobody can talk. This play is like a breath. You feel that people leaving the play are much less heavy because they talked, because they said what they felt. And there’s no other place for that right now in Europe, it’s so sensitive, people are so touched, so harmed by what’s going on that they cannot talk.”

The hope, said Quebec International Affairs Minister Christine St-Pierre, is that audiences here will be inspired to share best practices for preventing radicalization and target possible solutions.

“The play explains very well what is happening,” the minister said. “I think people have to know that (radicalization) can happen in their family. Most of the time, those young people come from very normal families. They go to school, they’re good at school, they’re not people who are criminalized.”

St-Pierre said she is proud of the role Quebec is playing — she hopes Montreal’s Centre for Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence will eventually be able to dispense advice to the international community.

The conference, co-organized by the Government of Quebec and UNESCO, runs from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 under the theme “Internet and the Radicalization of Youth: Preventing, Acting and Living Together.”

See more on this Topic